SHAKESPEARE ON MONASTIC LIFE: NUNS AND FRIARS IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE PDF Free Download
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RELI GION and the ARTS 5:3 (2001): 248-272. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden
Charles Alston Collins, Convent Thoughts, 1851. Courtesy of Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford, England.
SHAKESPEARE ON MONASTIC LIFE
NUNS AND FRIARS IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE
DAVID BEAUREGARD
Our Lady of Grace Seminary, Boston
In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595),
Shakespeare inserts some anachronistic lines, excised “on pious and/or
anachronistic grounds” by every nineteenth century production of the play
except one (Griffiths 91). When Hermia refuses her father’s command that
she marry Demetrius, Theseus, the Duke of Athens, warns her:
Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires,
Know of your youth, examine well your blood,
Whether, if you yield not to your father’s choice,
You can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
Thrice blessèd they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness (1.1.67-78)1
What is remarkable about this passage, aside from the fact that it was
always cut in nineteenth century productions, is its profoundly Catholic
spirituality, its realistic distinction between married life as “earthlier happy”
and monastic life as “blessed.” Shakespeare’s terminology suggests the dis-
tinction between the Aristotelian notion of happiness, which requires
friendship and hence marriage, and the more complete but paradoxical
New Testament notion of blessedness or beatitude (Mt 5:1-12), which is
achieved through poverty, mourning, meekness, and the endurance of
suffering. Renaissance philosophers and theologians were well aware of this
distinction in relation to the summum bonum or highest good (Scmitt
318-19), but no sixteenth century Reformed Protestant would have
described monastic life as blessed, much less “thrice blessèd.”
In the Shakespearean corpus as a whole, the treatment of Roman
Catholic religious is exceptionally sympathetic.2Shakespeare treats
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Franciscans particularly well, especially in view of the fact that, aside from
John Ford, other English Renaissance dramatists form an “anti-fraternal tra-
dition” which depicts friars as “duplicitous, immoral, and satanic” (Voss 5).
Such hostile characterization is not the case, however, with Friar Laurence
in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing, and Friar
Peter in Measure for Measure (Bevington 202; Milward 73; Voss 9). Nor is
it the case with Isabella and Francisca in Measure for Measure. What this
suggests, as some recent lines of investigation contend, is that Shakespeare
seems to have come, in cultural terms, from outside the “golden academic
triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge, and London.3His favorable treatment of
Franciscans is but one intimation of his cultural Catholicism, nurtured in
the heavily Catholic counties of Warwickshire and Lancashire.
My intention in this essay, therefore, is to explore some important
Roman Catholic theological dimensions of Measure for Measure having to
do with monastic life, particularly its portrait of Franciscan religious, its
representation of the sacrament of penance, and its concluding ambiguity
regarding the Duke’s offer of marriage to Isabella. Some recent accounts of
the play, taking their bearings from Reformed theology or secular assump-
tions, have claimed that monastic life is satirized or demystified (Gless
passim, Diehl 395). But such readings encounter three insuperable difficul-
ties. First of all, they do not harmonize well with Shakespeare’s generally
favorable treatment of Franciscan nuns and friars, a favorable treatment
poetically expressed in Measure for Measure when Isabella offers Angelo a
bribe of heavenly “gifts”:
true prayers
That shall be up at heaven and enter there
Ere sunrise – prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal. (2.2.157-61)
Second, Reformed readings do not account for Shakespeare’s departure
from the anti-Catholic conventions of English Protestant drama. As I shall
argue, it is clear that Shakespeare works against those conventions by
inverting their main features. The most striking indication of this is his
portrayal of nuns and friars as virtue figures over against a tradition that
represented them as vice figures. Third, such readings overlook the signif-
icance of Shakespeare’s development of his sources. One would expect a
Reformed Protestant or secular sensibility, whose intention was to demys-
tify or satirize, to have taken advantage of the opportunity to allow Isabella
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to lose her virginity and finally accept an offer of marriage. This is precisely
what her counterparts do in the sources for the play. But Shakespeare trans-
forms his heroine into a nun, a prospective novice of the Poor Clares, who
preserves her virginity and does not marry. It is difficult to see this as
demystification or satire. In short, readings based on Reformed or secular
assumptions do not enable us to explain the basic features and nuances of
Shakespeare’s development of his sources, nor do they account for his
adversarial relation to the English Protestant dramatic tradition.4
THE ANTIFRATE RNAL TRADITION
First, then, in order to assess Shakespeare’s portrait of Franciscan
religious, it is necessary to investigate the relation of Measure for Measure to
the antifraternal tradition. As the casual reader can see from the works of
Boccaccio and Chaucer, the medieval tradition of antifraternal literature
concerned itself with satirizing the moral failures of friars, particularly their
sins of the flesh and their hypocrisy (Gless 61-69). With the advent of
Reformed theology, however, the essential elements of the religious life
itself came under literary attack, and such things as vows, the cloistered life,
celibacy, and the priesthood were pilloried. In early Reformation drama, the
conventional figure of the Vice was often portrayed as a Roman Catholic
priest-player (White 171), and by virtue of their distinctive religious habits,
the Franciscan friar and the cloistered nun became stage conventions
(Pineas, Tudor and Early Stuart 23; Voss 5). In George Chapman’s May-Day
(1611) there is a telling reference to the convention:
Out upon’t, that disguise [of a “friar’s weed”] is worn thread-
bare upon every stage, and so much villainy committed
under that habit that ‘tis grown as suspicious as the vilest.
(quoted in Miles 171)
Various other strategies were employed against stage nuns and friars –
derogatory epithets, sarcastic asides, reversals of attitude, outright rejection
of cloistered life, abusive flouting, physical punishment, and many others
(Pineas, Tudor and Early Stuart 23-43).
Perhaps the most effective anti-Catholic strategy used in Reformation
plays, then, was to identify the conventional figure of the Vice with
Catholic figures (Pineas, Tudor and Early Stuart 16). But Shakespeare’s use
of the Vice clearly does not follow Protestant lines. Rather than identify this
stock figure with one of the Franciscan religious in Measure for Measure,
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which is what we would expect if the play is antifraternal satire,
Shakespeare identifies the Vice with a secular figure. Thus, as the comic
focal point of the sexual intemperance endemic in Vienna, Lucio is given
the role of Vice. He is not explicitly tagged in the manner of the personifi-
cations of the old Morality plays, but rather he is represented in the newer
realistic style in which the Vice becomes “a dramatic symbol for the attitude
or force within the kingdom which the dramatist wishes to single out as a
basic cause of contemporary evils” (Winston 233-41). Finally, at the end of
the play, when by means of multiple marriages restitution has been made
for various sexual irregularities, Lucio is fittingly punished as the play’s
scapegoat by being married to a prostitute. Significantly, none of the
Franciscan monastic figures is punished for sins of the flesh or exposed as
hypocritical.
But Lucio is not alone. There are other secular exemplifications of
vice as well. The taxonomy of vice in the play can be found in the “Secunda
Pars” of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, specifically under the virtue of
temperance (2a2ae 146-58). Some suggestion of this taxonomy comes in
the play’s final scene, when Isabella speaks of Angelo’s “intemperate
concupiscible lust” (5.1.103), a precise Thomistic classification of lust as
intemperance in respect to the concupiscible desire for sexual pleasure.
On both the comic and serious level, this classification in its full form
governs the play in some detail. As the action moves along, various
instances of sexual irregularity are brought to our attention – Claudio has
gotten Julietta pregnant, Angelo attempts to seduce Isabella, Lucio has
impregnated and broken his promise to Kate Keepdown (3.2.194-96), and
Angelo is found to be guilty of a “promise-breach” with Mariana. Thus
Shakespeare depicts sexual intemperance in general (Lucio) and three of
its various Thomistic species – fornication (Claudio), attempted seduction
(Angelo), and sacrilege (Angelo; see Aquinas 2a2ae 154.1, 10). The
representation is not rigidly schematic, as the compounded instance of
Angelo indicates, but one can add prostitution (Mistress Overdone),
drunkenness (Barnardine) and anger (Isabella’s defiant reaction to
Claudio) to the species of intemperance depicted (see Aquinas 2a2ae 150,
158). Of course, the argument can be made that Shakespeare did not
need the Summa in order to represent these commonplace species of
sexual intemperance, but the precision of Isabella’s phrase about
“intemperate concupiscible lust” (5.1.103) and the tight cluster of virtues
and vices described by Aquinas (2a2ae qq. 146-58) and exhibited
in the play (abstinence, fasting, sobriety, drunkenness, virginity, sexual
intemperance, fornication, seduction, sacrilegious lust, clemency, severity
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and anger) can hardly be coincidental (Beauregard, Virtue’s Own Feature
139-55).
It is important to note that all these sexual sins are transgressions by sec-
ular characters who inhabit the secular sectors of the city – the court, the
stews and the prison. By contrast, the four Franciscan religious pursue the
contemplative life within the confines of the cloister, most pointedly in the
case of Isabella, who embodies the virtue of virginal chastity. Aquinas’
remarks are worth quoting:
…if a man abstain from bodily pleasures, in order more
freely to give himself to the contemplation of truth, this is in
accordance with the rectitude of reason. Now holy virginity
refrains from all venereal pleasure in order more freely to
have leisure for Divine contemplation… (2a2ae 152.2)
The traditional distinction between the active and the contemplative life is
thus sharply reflected in the settings in monastery and convent, over against
the court and prison. This distinction of course had little currency in
Reformed circles.
Moreover, this distinction in the play’s setting between the active and
contemplative life is consistent with Shakespeare’s treatment of the vow of
chastity. For the Reformers, marriage was highly valued and consecrated vir-
ginity was considered impious, and it is therefore significant that a sense of
the sacred permeates Shakespeare’s conception of the vow of chastity.
Shocked by his desire for Isabella, Angelo speaks of his “desire to raze the
sanctuary” (2.2.178), clearly implying that Isabella’s chastity is sacred.
Contrariwise, what is striking is that all the transgressions of vows occur
with the secular characters and not with the Franciscan religious. Claudio’s
“true contract” lacks the “denunciation of outward order,” Angelo is guilty
of “promise-breach,” and Lucio has not kept his promise of marriage to
Kate Keepdown (3.3.194-6). On the other hand, none of the Franciscan
religious violates a vow of chastity, poverty or obedience. Thus the critical
claim that they are satirized and demystified is without substance, and
critics are driven to vague charges of “hypocrisy,” disparity between
“behavior and perfection,” or failure to live up to “ideals of purity and holi-
ness” (Diehl 404-5). These general charges lack the precision of the
Reformers’ objections to the cloistered life: the charge that vows of chastity,
poverty, and obedience were hypocritically presumptive, and the allegation
that monastic life is a “flight from the world.” Shakespeare’s play in effect
reverses these charges by showing us Isabella maintaining her chastity while
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both she and the Duke (with the help of the other friars) operate success-
fully in the world by bringing their virtue to bear on its problems.
To sum up thus far: Shakespeare reverses the main dramatic devices
by which Reformed dramatists attacked Franciscan cloistered life, namely,
by portraying them in the role of the Vice, by depicting their violation of
vows (particularly chastity), and by showing them in flight from the world.
With the monastic figures in Measure for Measure, however, there is no
serious transgression of a vow, nor is there a flight from the world. Isabella
(like her source figure) could easily have been made to sin against chastity
and finally marry, and the drunken Barnardine could easily have been made
a friar. Shakespeare declines to exploit these opportunities. Even further,
as we shall see, he reverses other devices used against Catholic religious,
whereby they were exposed as hypocrites, their deviousness and duplicity
were made transparent, and their vows were repudiated in favor of
marriage.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s contemplative Franciscans have their faults.
Awareness of the shortcomings of religious is, however, part of the pre-
Reformation tradition of the English Morality play (Pineas, “English
Morality Play” 160), and Shakespeare, like Chaucer, is not given to a naive
idealism about contemplative religious life, as is evident from Lucio’s
proverbial remark “Cucullus not facit monachum [a cowl does not make a
monk]” (5.1.271). Accordingly, Shakespeare characterizes Francisca as exces-
sively precise about her rule, a light satirical touch that constitutes an
acknowledgement that religious have their shortcomings. Perhaps more
seriously, Isabella is technically guilty of lying and false testimony (3.1.266;
5.1.106),5and Friar Peter pretends that the Duke is sick (5.1.157-8). But
Shakespeare makes nothing of these dramatic deceptions, obviously
because at their respective points in the action they are necessary to further
the Duke’s stratagem. If the matter must be considered from a moral stand-
point, this insouciance about lying and deception would seem to best
accord with the remarks of Aquinas:
As regards the end in view, a lie may be contrary to charity,
through being told with the purpose of injuring God, and
this is always a mortal sin, for it is opposed to religion; or in
order to injure one’s neighbor, in his person, his possessions,
or his good name, and this also is a mortal sin, since it is a
mortal sin to injure one’s neighbor… But if the end intend-
ed be not contrary to charity, neither will the lie, considered
under this aspect, be a mortal sin, as in the case of a jocose
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lie, where some pleasure is intended, or in an officious lie,
where the good of one’s neighbor is intended.
(2a2ae 110.4)
It is clear that Shakespeare is aware of the transgressive character of the
stratagem of the bed-trick, for the Duke says to Isabella “the doubleness of
the benefit defends the deceit from reproof” (3.2.258-60), but it is equally
clear that what is morally paramount is not the deceit but the consideration
of the benefits to be achieved. That is, from a purely moral standpoint, the
intention and the good to be achieved ameliorate the defective and trans-
gressive nature of the act.
Similarly, just as the monastic figures are not free of faults, so the secular
vice figures are not without their virtues. Shakespeare does not have Lucio
pursue vice with a rationalistic consistency, since this comic libertine dis-
plays compassion for Claudio, informs Isabella of her brother’s plight, and
helps her to argue her case more effectively. But again his benevolent
actions are quite in accord with the dramatic tradition of the Vice who can
“help as well as hinder” (Winston 236). In allowing the virtuous characters
their faults and the vice figures their virtues, Shakespeare’s purpose, then,
was not to construct perfect exemplars of Franciscan religious life, or pure
examples of sexual evil, but to render images of virtue and vice with some
plausibility and verisimilitude. He neither idealizes his religious figures nor
demonizes his vice figures.
NUNS
Granted that the main features of the anti-fraternal tradition are
reversed by Shakespeare, it remains to see how these reversals play out in
specific scenes dealing with nuns and friars. Much has been made of the
play’s fourth scene as an anti-monastic satire (Gless 103). To be sure, with
the arrival of Lucio at the convent, Francisca pays an overly precise atten-
tion to the rule and expresses a degree of timidity before a strange man. But
her timidity throws into high relief Isabella’s virginal poise and self-posses-
sion before Lucio’s bold cynicism about virginity:
LUCIO: Hail, virgin, if you be, as those cheek roses
Proclaim you are no less…
ISABELLA: You do blaspheme the good in mocking me.
(1.4.16-17, 38)
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(Compare Aquinas’ definition of blasphemy as “the disparagement of some
surpassing goodness, especially that of God” 2a2ae 13.1). By characterizing
Lucio as profane and cynical – two scenes before he has been consorting
with the prostitute Mistress Overdone – Shakespeare precludes any disre-
spect for Isabella and her entry into monastic life. So also he defuses Lucio’s
impertinent ridicule of the good, one of the conventional methods
employed by the Vice (Pineas, “English Morality Play” 162-3). Lucio’s
impertinence undercuts two other recent critical claims, in themselves too
forced and recondite, that the scene is a parody of the Annunciation, with
Lucio reminding us of the angel Gabriel, “my cousin Juliet” of Elizabeth,
and Isabella of the Virgin Mary, and that it plays on the iconography of the
saints’ lives (Lupton 112-13). The parallels are too slight and unrealized to
provide much parody, and Lucio’s ridicule of the good simply serves to
define his unsavory character. A more readily accessible and plausible
source of typology exists in the dramatic tradition of the Vice, which would
cast Lucio in the role of Lucifer, the tempter and the prince of lies
(Winston 235). Lucio’s name, his involvement in sexual vice, and his bold,
cynical demeanor suggest this in much more forthright fashion.
Furthermore, there is much more to this convent scene than a simple
touch of satire and profane mockery. This brief introductory vignette
manifests the nascent virtue of Isabella, moved as she is by the desire for “a
more strict restraint” and fewer privileges. In Aristotelian-Thomistic
fashion, Shakespeare places Isabella between two extreme figures. She
stands as something of a temperate mean between Francisca the timid rule-
follower, who minces “may” and “may not” and recoils at the sound of a
man’s voice, and Lucio the sexual libertine, who is boldly contemptuous of
virginity. If we were to apply the Thomistic taxonomy strictly, Isabella
might be most accurately described as embodying the virtue of “honesty,”
one of the integral parts of the cardinal virtue of temperance. Its opposing
extremes would be represented by Francisca as “shamefacedness” and Lucio
as the vice of “intemperance.” These three dispositions are discussed by
Aquinas in sequence (2a2ae 142-45):
Taken strictly virtue is a perfection… Wherefore anything
that is inconsistent with perfection, though it be good, falls
short of the notion of virtue. Now shamefacedness is incon-
sistent with perfection, because it is the fear of something
base, namely of that which is disgraceful. Hence Damascene
says that shamefacedness is fear of a base action…
But one who is perfect as to a virtuous habit, does not
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apprehend that which would be disgraceful and base to do,
as being possible and arduous, that is to say difficult for him
to avoid; nor does he actually do anything base, so as to be
in fear of disgrace. Therefore shamefacedness, properly
speaking, is not a virtue, since it falls short of the perfection
of virtue. (2a2ae 144.1)
As one of the integral parts of temperance, shamefacedness (verecundia) has
none of the “spiritual beauty” characteristic of honesty (honestum), which
springs from the honor attached to the excellence of virtue, “the disposition
of the perfect to the best” [dispositio perfecti ad optimum]:
Now the disgraceful is opposed to the beautiful: and oppo-
sites are most manifestive of one another. Wherefore it
seems honesty belongs especially to temperance, since the
latter repels that which is most disgraceful and unbecoming
to man, namely animal lusts. (2a2ae 145.4)
Fear of disgrace in failing to follow the rule seems to drive Francisca, while
Isabella certainly seems her opposite in her more positive desire to pursue
“the best.” As the embodiment of virginity, she naturally describes her
brother’s fornication as “a vice that most I do abhor” (2.2.32), and so, when
Claudio suggests she trade her virginity for his life (3.1.133-38 f.), her brief
show of anger is more understandable. Obviously Shakespeare did not
intend to illustrate Aquinas, but something close to this taxonomy seems
to govern this scene.
Shakespeare quickly develops this embryonic scene by more precisely
representing four virtues and vices allied to temperance, specifically severi-
ty and clemency, and virginity and lust (Aquinas 152-54; 157.1-2). An
essential distinction between Catholic virtue and Puritan vice becomes
apparent, when in the second act Shakespeare stages two agonistic con-
frontations or “contentions” focussed on these dispositions. The initial
problem is the sexual transgression of Claudio in getting Julietta pregnant,
and the question is whether to make an example of him. Shakespeare
invites us to consider whether the proper response is severity or clemency.
Angelo advocates severity for the sake of the common good of Vienna,
while Isabella is moved to plead for clemency to preserve her brother’s life.
A clear parallelism begins to emerge as Angelo, in Puritan fashion, contin-
ues to insist on the severe penalty of death, whereas contrariwise Isabella in
her Roman Catholic habit advocates a more moderate penalty (“O let him
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marry her”). Analogously, there is a contrast in penitential methods of con-
trolling sexual transgressions. Angelo has previously subjected Claudio to
a public shaming Puritan-style (1.2) and the Duke in Franciscan habit has
privately heard Juliet’s confession according to the Roman Catholic form of
the sacrament of penance (2.3).
This contrast between Puritan severity and Catholic clemency contin-
ues to develop in subsequent scenes. Just as the first contention exhibits the
severity of Angelo and the clemency of Isabella, the second contention
underscores and develops another undeniable moral difference between
these two main figures. In the guise of a novice of the Poor Clares, Isabella
clearly embodies the virtue of virginity, one of the species of temperance.
By contrast, Angelo, who like Isabella has been initially characterized as a
severe ascetic, exhibits the opposing vice of lust. Significantly he is not a
given a Franciscan habit but rather the sensibility (and in the BBC pro-
duction the costume) of a Puritan. In the words of the Duke, he is “pre-
cise... [and] scarce confesses/That his blood flows or that his appetite is
more to bread than stone” (1.3.50-53). To Lucio he is:
…a man whose blood
Is very snow broth; one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense,
But doth rebate and blunt his natural edge
With profits of the mind, study, and fast. (1.4.57-61)
This description is sharply and explicitly critical, rather than lightly satirical
en passant as with Francisca. Since Angelo denies the “motions of the
sense,” he is at first depicted in terms of the Aristotelian-Thomistic vice of
insensibility, the extreme opposite to the intemperance we see in Lucio. In
its Elizabethan Puritan form, outward austerity was allied with precision,
hypocrisy, and zeal for laws against adultery, all qualities portrayed in
Angelo (McGinn 131-35; Hamilton 111-12). Paradoxically, Angelo is at first
harsh and condemnatory in his precision, and then he easily swings from
the vice of insensibility to the other extreme of hypocritical and intemper-
ate lust. His encounter with the beautiful Isabella is the catalyst that quick-
ly turns his precision into intemperance. For all the initial severity and
asceticism of Isabella and Angelo, therefore, a sharp distinction emerges
between her Roman Catholic virtue and his Puritanical vice. Again rever-
sing the conventions of the antifraternal tradition, Shakespeare takes up the
charge of hypocrisy usually leveled by Reformed theologians against nuns
and monks and their vows of chastity, and directs it against a Puritan
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sensibility. However, by discreetly not applying a religious label to Angelo,
he indicates once more his interest in the exhibition of moral dispositions
rather than the representation of theological polemics.
FRIARS
When we turn from Franciscan nuns to friars, similar configurations of
virtue and vice become apparent. Our first encounter with friars comes in
the third scene. Duke Vincentio is talking with Friar Thomas, and their con-
versation is carried on in a respectful tone. In explaining his intention of
posing as a friar, the Duke shows Friar Thomas great trust and very respect-
fully addresses him as “holy Father,” “holy sir,” “pious sir,” and “my father”
(1.3.1, 7, 16, 39). This note of respect and trust towards friars continues in
later scenes when the Duke confides in Friar Peter as his messenger (4.5)
and appoints him as guide to Mariana and Isabella in their suit against
Angelo (4.6.9-15; 5.1.20). In the guise of friar, the Duke himself is called
“holy” or “good” some ten times (see Spevack under “Father” and “friar”).
Contrariwise, Lucio refers to friars merely as “Friar” (3.2.76, 82, 85, 97,
101). Only once does he refer to the Duke as “good Friar” (3.2.173). In the
final scene, he severely berates him as “a meddling friar,” “a saucy friar,” “a
very scurvy fellow,” “a rascal,” “Goodman Baldpate,” “damnable fellow,” “a
bald-pated, lying rascal,” and a “knave.”6
But obviously Duke Vincentio is not a true friar. He simply adopts the
Franciscan habit as a disguise by which to observe “if power change pur-
pose, what our seemers be” (1.3.54). He has been accurately described as a
Counter-Vice or Anti-Vice, who uses his “craft against vice” (Winston
243). Thus, his disguise is employed as part of a political policy, which has
as its end the discernment of character and the common good, rather than
a fraudulent deception undertaken for evil purposes of seduction. The
employment of disguise as a dramatic device again does not amount to a
demystification or satire on monastic life. There is no suggestion of fraud
here, no hidden villainies, no disparity between ideal and real practices, as
there are in Boccaccio and Chaucer.
Perhaps even more importantly, since there is no textual indication of a
change in costume, the Duke remains dressed in his Franciscan robes after
he has been unhooded by Lucio (5.1.363). The retention of his Franciscan
habit lends to the proceedings a certain religious authority. Indeed, it is clear
that Shakespeare intends Lucio’s unhooding of the Duke as a reversal of
the exposure of a friar. It also reverses the more general trope of Protestant
apocalyptic exposure of Catholic corruption (Shell 23-32). Thus, Lucio’s
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act of unhooding backfires, since it exposes the Duke in all his authority
and undercuts the vituperative insolence of Lucio himself:
LUCIO: Come, sir, come, sir, come, sir; foh, sir! Why you
bald-pated, lying rascal, you must be hooded, must you?
Show your knave’s visage, with a pox to you! Show your
sheep-biting face, and be hanged an hour! Will ’t not off?
[He pulls off the friar’s hood, and discovers the Duke. Angelo and
Escalus rise.]
DUKE: Thou art the first knave that e’er mad’st a duke.
First, Provost, let me bail these gentle three [Isabella,
Mariana, and Friar Peter].
[To Lucio.] Sneak not away, sir, for the Friar and you must
have a word anon. Lay hold on him.
LUCIO: This may prove worse than hanging. (5.1.363-68)
Here laughter is directed at the consequences of Lucio’s anti-Franciscan
action. The exposure of “Friar Lodowick” brings Lucio some deserved
punishment. It is inaccurate and misleading, then, to maintain that, in
“using the clerical habit of the friar as a disguise that the Duke puts on and
off and eventually discards, the play also demystifies monasticism, perhaps
even reinforcing Protestant associations of friars with a fraudulent theatri-
cality… and false disguise” (Diehl 395). The mere absence of the Duke’s
disguise in Act 4 scene 5 takes place without comment, and there is no tex-
tual evidence that the Duke discards the habit in the final Act. Neither
scene carries any suggestion of demystification. If anything, friars and the
Franciscan habit are associated with authority and truth, not with “frau-
dulent theatricality and false disguise.”
Beyond the question of Duke Vincentio’s disguise, there are the two
important stratagems he undertakes: the bed-trick and the substitution of
Ragozine’s head for Claudio’s. Only the first has received much critical
attention. As a source for Measure for Measure, Shakespeare used George
Whetstone’s An Heptameron of Civill Discourses (1582), in which the story
of Promos and Cassandra is immediately preceded by the tale of Friar
Inganno (N1r-N2r). Whetstone’s narrative strategy (by way of Giraldi
Cinthio) proceeds in three steps. First, Friar Inganno (Friar Fraud) tells
Dame Farina that St. Francis means to visit her at night as Friar Inganno.
Next, the Friar’s deceit is discovered when Dame Farina tells her parish
priest. When Friar Inganno returns that night, he leaps into bed with an
ugly maid named Leayda, who has been substituted for Dame Farina. At
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this point, the parish priest and others enter with candles and torches, and
they begin singing “Salve, Saincte Francisce.” Finally, they bind and strip
Inganno, lay him in a bundle of nettles, scourge him, and cover him with
honey so that he is tormented by hornets, wasps, and flies. The exposure
of Franciscan vice ends in punishment and laughter.
With Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, this three step process of
stratagem, exposure, and punishment assumes a very different form.
None of the Duke’s three stratagems – his disguise as a friar, the bed-trick,
and his substitution of Ragozine’s head for Claudio’s – are evil in their
intention. In fact all three stratagems are undertaken for good purposes,
and with the help of Friar Peter they are turned to good account, so that
they succeed in preserving life and bringing about marital union for three
couples. As we confront the various sexual problems created by the main
figures – Claudio’s getting Julietta pregnant, Angelo’s attempted seduction
of Isabella, Lucio’s impregnation and broken promise to Kate Keepdown
(3.2.194-96), and Angelo’s “promise-breach” with Mariana – Shakespeare
makes nuns and friars virtuous accomplices who aid the Duke in his pro-
ject and help to bring everything to a just and proper conclusion. There is
no punishment of any friar figure, as there is of the secular figures. In short,
the anti-fraternal tradition in which friars are exposed as immoral schemers
is again turned on its head.
IMAGES OF AURICULAR CONFESSION:
JULIETTA, MARIANA, BARNARDINE
If Duke Vincentio’s Franciscan disguise and stratagems are questionable
as instances of “demystification” and satire, the same can be said for the
Duke’s priestly actions of giving pastoral counsel and hearing confession.
The play presents the Duke counseling or confessing four characters,
actions that are appropriate expressions of the play’s concern with the
virtue of clemency. Juliet is the first to confess to the Duke as Friar, and she
is treated rather gently and sympathetically. Next Claudio is counseled with
the brilliant speech “Be absolute for death” (3.1.5 f.), encouraging him to
face his impending death. The speech seems well-meant but somewhat
severe. Although Claudio is initially persuaded, he relents and delivers an
equally poignant speech “Aye, but to die” (3.1.119 f.), which significantly the
Duke listens to from a position of concealment. From this point on, the
Duke begins to display greater compassion and clemency. Isabella is aided
in her predicament. Mariana is told that she has not sinned and is helped
to achieve her desire. Barnardine is in such a state that his execution is put
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off. And in the final scene the Duke manifests a “tempered judgment.” All
of this seems in line with the general trajectory of the play as it moves from
severity in the early scenes (with the Duke, Isabella, and Angelo) to a final
clemency (with Isabella and the Duke).
But what of the representation of the sacrament of confession? The
three confessional scenes, involving Julietta, Mariana, Barnardine and Duke
Vincentio in his friar’s disguise (2.3; 4.1; 4.3), are obvious representations
of Catholic sacramental practice. The primary indication of their
Catholicity is of course the simple dramatic fact that they are conducted by
a Friar, not a Protestant pastor. One obvious difficulty, however, is that the
Duke is not a true priest. Although this provides a perfect occasion for
demystification of the priesthood and monastic life, the absence of any
attempt at dramatic exposure of the “fraud,” together with the favorable
treatment of Franciscan religious and the regular reversal of anti-Catholic
dramatic conventions, compels us to take the confession scenes as they are.
Shakespeare makes nothing of this opportunity to demystify.
With respect to Measure for Measure, it is not difficult to determine
which form of penance is represented, given the dramatic necessity of a
selective representation (Beauregard, “Shakespeare Against the Homilies”).
During the English Reformation, the conception of penance was altered
from its medieval scholastic form, in which it was a sacrament composed of
three parts or movements: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. That
form required the precise enumeration of sins in an “auricular confession”
to a priest, who gave absolution and assigned penitential acts of satisfaction.
In its secularized Protestant form, however, it became a purely interior form
consisting of four parts or movements: contrition, confession, faith, and
amendment of life (Certaine Sermons 271). Confession was made to God,
not to a priest. Auricular confession was merely allowed as a pastoral mea-
sure, and absolution was replaced by a declaration of forgiveness.
Satisfaction or “doing penance” was dismissed as unnecessary and was
generalized into “amendment of life.” Thus, what was previously a sacra-
ment with a social and external dimension requiring a precise examination
of conscience with the aid of a priest, became a completely privatized and
interiorized exercise, which merely permitted and allowed for exteriori-
zation in the form of auricular confession:
I doe not say, but that if any doe finde themselues troubled
in conscience, they may repayre to their learned Curate or
Pastour, or to some other godly learned man, and shew the
trouble and doubt of their conscience to them, that they may
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receiue at their hand the comfortable salue of GODS word:
but it is against the true Christian libertie, that any man
should bee bound to the numbring of his sinnes, as it hath
beene vsed heretofore in the time of blindnesse and igno-
rance. (Certaine Sermons 267)
The play presents a distinct contrast between two types of penitential
action, one the public punishment imposed on sinners by the Elizabethan
bawdy courts, and the other the private confession of sins characteristic of
Catholic pastoral practice. Properly speaking, the first type is a juridical
action, and the second is a pastoral one. Shakespeare seems sensitive to the
historical consequences of the suppression of auricular confession, namely
that since sexual incontinence was no longer controlled through the private
confessional it had to be through public punishment. Thus, Claudio’s
public shaming as he is led through the streets clearly suggests English
Protestant social and civil practice, significantly ordered by the Puritanical
Angelo. But it cannot be construed as the first part of a single penitential
ritual that is later completed by Juliet’s confession and reconciliation
(Hayne 12). Rather it provides a contrast with Catholic sacramental prac-
tice. With Juliet, there is clearly contrition and auricular confession to a
Friar in Catholic fashion and in a pastoral rather than juridical context:
DUKE: Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?
JULIET: I do, and bear the shame most patiently.
DUKE: I’ll teach you how you should arraign your conscience,
And try your penitence, if it be sound,
Or hollowly put on…
JULIET: I do confess and repent it, Father.
DUKE: …But lest you do repent
As that the sin hath brought you to this shame,
Which sorrow is always toward ourselves, not heaven,
Showing we would not spare heaven as we love it,
But as we stand in fear –
JULIET: I do repent me as it is an evil,
And take the shame with joy.
DUKE: There rest…
Grace go with you. Benedicite! – (2.3.19-40).
Juliet makes an auricular confession to the Duke as Friar and “Father,”
complete with a suggestion of final absolution when the Duke bids her
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David Beauregard
“Grace go with you. Benedicite.” If the element of satisfaction is missing,
still the representation is more in the Catholic than the Church of England
form. Juliet is not simply showing “the trouble and doubt” of her con-
science to her Curate or Pastor, or confessing to a layman. The Duke teach-
es her how to arraign her conscience and tests the authenticity of her
sorrow, making sure she is not motivated by shame or fear, but by a real
detestation of her sin. His role is that of authoritative teacher, director and
priest, not that of confidante, advisor and pastor.
Somewhat similar are the cases of Mariana and Barnardine. Although
Mariana does not confess to the Duke, he pronounces a judgment in assur-
ing her that the bed-trick is “no sin” (4.1.72). As for Barnardine, using a
clearly Roman Catholic term, the Duke intends to “give him a present
shrift” (4.2.207), a term that suggests Catholic practice and does not occur
in the Homilies. But amusingly Barnardine demands more time to prepare
and refuses to “consent to die this day” (4.3.54-56). In short, in the Duke’s
activity as Friar-Confessor, we observe the truncated representation of
Roman Catholic sacramental penance or auricular confession. It is sympa-
thetically presented, whereas the public shaming of Claudio is not. As a
minor parallel to this depiction of the sacramental function of the Friar-
Duke, it is worth noting that the marriage of Angelo is carried out off-stage
by Friar Peter (5.1.377-79), manifesting once again the consistently Catholic
mentality shaping the play.
CON CLU SI ON: MARRIAGE OR THE CONVENT?
The conclusion of Measure for Measure is notoriously ambiguous, and
so it has been construed in various ways. The final scene raises two issues.
Taken as a whole, it has been read as Isabella’s release from claustrophobic
monastic confinement (Gless 213), as a Calvinistic public rehearsal of
shame (Diehl 409), and as an exercise in judicial recompense for sexual
crimes (Friedman 456). Read with its sources in mind and in concert with
the play’s representation of various species of intemperance, the scene is
most consistently read as a judicial proceeding involving punishment and
clemency. Several acts of pardon and punishment occur. Having aban-
doned his initial policy of severity, Duke Vincentio pardons Angelo,
Barnardine, Claudio, and Lucio. He also meets out a tempered punishment
in the form of three rather sober marriages. Angelo is sent offstage to marry
Mariana, Claudio is to marry Julietta, and Lucio is forced to marry the pros-
titute Kate Keepdown. The overall tone is markedly less celebratory and
more sober than in the romantic comedies. In keeping with our account,
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this sobriety of tone issues understandably from Shakespeare’s concern
with justice and clemency, with his working toward the representation of a
final “tempered judgment” in the person of the Duke.
The second issue has to do with Isabella’s response to the Duke’s prof-
fer of marriage. Again, several interpretations have been proposed. One
critic sees Isabella as accepting the Duke’s offer (Gless 212). At the other
extreme, another sees Isabella as shocked, as resistent to being “an object of
exchange in an economy of male desire” (Mullaney 110). A third critic
reads the Duke’s offer as an attempt to recompense Isabella for the slan-
derous dishonor she has received from participating in his scheme
(Friedman 461). But for these conjectures there is no evidence in the text.
The ending is conspicuously ambiguous.
Isabella’s silence is remarkable in the light of other English Renaissance
plays dealing with a similar situation. In Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay (1594), Margaret after having taken her vows decides to leave the
convent and marry Lord Lacy:
The flesh is frail. My lord doth know it well,
That when he comes with his enchanting face,
Whatso’er betide, I cannot say him nay;
Off goes the habit of a maiden’s heart,
And, seeing Fortune will, fair Framingham,
And all the show of holy nuns, farewell.
Lacey for me, if he will be my lord. (Scene xiv, 86-92)
Similarly, in The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1608), Millicent is a professed
nun who decides to leave the cloistered life to marry her lover:
With pardon, sir, that name [“profest Nun”] is quite undone;
This true-loue knot cancelles both maid and Nun. (5.1.202-3)
Finally, in Whetstone’s Heptameron of Civill Discourses (1582), one of
Shakespeare’s sources, Lucia Bella, a prospective novice like Isabella, is
explicitly won over to arguments in favor of marriage:
Senior Philoxenus, by the vertue of this dayes exercise… so
raysed the heartes of the companie, with the desire of
Mariage, that Lucia Bella, who, in the beginning of
Christmasse, was determyned to haue beene a vestall Nunne,
now confessed that they were enemies to Nature, and not
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David Beauregard
worthy the society of men, which scandylised, or scorned
this sacred Institution. The rest of this honorable company,
by plawsible speeches, confirmed Lucia Bellas opinion, or by
silence shewed a willyng consent. (Z3r-Z3v)
It is clear that Shakespeare does not have Isabella explicitly confess
that nuns are “enemies to Nature.” Nor does he make of her silence a
“willyng consent.” Rather, since the Duke is made to repeat his offer of
marriage twice, the text suggests a calculated ambiguity, if not a decided
restraint.
Give me your hand and say you will be mine.
…Dear Isabel,
I have a motion much imports your good,
Whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline,
What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. –
So, bring us to our palace, where we’ll show
What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know.
[Exeunt.] (5.1.503, 546-50)
Shakespeare does not have Isabella accept – or for that matter even
respond to – the Duke’s offer of marriage, the acceptance of which would
be a full and clear capitulation to the Reformed distaste for vows of celi-
bacy and the cloistered life. It is evident that Shakespeare’s sources were
disposed to allow Isabella (like her counterparts in Cinthio and
Whetstone) to lose her virginity and finally accept an offer of marriage. The
same pattern holds true for two of his fellow dramatists. If the intention
here is satire or demystification or direct opposition inspired by Reformed
theology, it is odd that Shakespeare leaves us wondering.
Moreover, the usual ending of Shakespearean comedy in marriage,
realized only in the offing in this unromantic comedy, falls short with
Isabella. By the end of the play, the Duke has clearly become open to the
“dribbling dart of love,” which early on he has gently scorned (1.3.2). Why
then did Shakespeare not underline his point by having Isabella indicate in
some fashion her willingness to abandon her religious vocation for mar-
riage? If the patterns in his sources, in contemporary plays, and the usual
trajectory of his romantic comedies disposed him in that direction, what
prevented him from writing such a conclusion? The most plausible answer
is that a calculated ambiguity would have done double service by not
offending Catholics in the audience and by pleasing Protestants with an
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ending implying marriage. In either case, he would have pleased his hetero-
geneous audience.
*
The prospect of a Roman Catholic Shakespeare will seem under-
standably distressing to those for whom Catholicism is “sectarian.” This
fear of producing a partisan Shakespeare is largely unfounded. As I have
suggested, the main focus of Shakespeare’s plays is on moral psychology,
not on theology. In the main, the plays represent the virtues, the vices and
the passions, not theological mysteries or doctrines. Moreover, by virtue of
historical circumstance, Shakespeare is “universal” in that his Catholicism
was largely suppressed and does not obtrude upon most of the plays.
Nevertheless, it is ingenuous to suppose that the dogmatic oppositions
between Catholic and Reformed had no impact on him and that we can
place him somewhere along a spectrum of gradations of anti-Calvinism. In
their individualistic assumptions about the complexities of religious belief,
critics who adopt such positions fail to comprehend the corporate nature
of Elizabethan religion, wherein the Churches defined the doctrines
accepted by their individual members, and the interrelations between
doctrines created a stable coherence. One would have paid the price of
expulsion from the church community by expressing a laissez-faire attitude
toward doctrine.
Behind the fear of a “sectarian” Shakespeare one can detect the
sensibility of Kant’s “autonomous” individual – enlightened, sceptical,
transcendent, isolate, free and independent of any historical determination.7
For such an individual religion is not only a sect apart from an undefined
mainstream but also a superstition rather than a confrontation with the
realities of suffering, sin and death. Thus, in the words of one critic,
Shakespeare displays “an incomparable aloofness from all partisan religious
issues” (Stevenson 80). Another characterizes him as “essentially secular,
temporal, non-theological” and warns us against an “overly eager identifica-
tion of Shakespeare’s plays with Christian teachings in general and with the
Catholic tradition in particular” (Frye 7, 293). Most recently, Shakespeare
has become, if not a subversive interested in questions of power and
containment, then a sceptical, non-dogmatic Prince of Indeterminacy, a pro-
ducer of “exploratory” plays, suffused with ambiguities, ambivalences, polar
oppositions, dilemmas and insoluble moral complexities. The problem is, of
course, that these Enlightenment and Modern Skeptical models simply
assume a privileged position, projecting onto Shakespeare their own
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David Beauregard
sectarian doctrines and agenda. Hence, he is aloof, skeptical, indeterminate,
and so on.
More seriously, such positions fail to address current research in a con-
vincing way. With the recent surge of revisionist scholarship in English
Reformation history, in Renaissance philosophy, and in Aristotelian virtue
ethics,8there is a need to reposition Shakespeare in historical context. The
one account of Shakespeare that remains unexplored is that he was a
“church papist;” yet recent evidence increasingly indicates that he was pre-
cisely that.9And it can be argued that such a profile can incorporate and
explain the subversive politics, the theological allusions, the moral com-
plexities, the strategic ambiguities, all in more perfect alignment with bio-
graphical facts. We have seen the alternative – a bowdlerized Shakespeare,
transcending theology and history, scandalizing nobody and “equally acces-
sible to Christians and to the virtuous heathen” (Frye 272). But, as Gary
Taylor has astutely pointed out, such a vacuous Shakespeare is an histori-
cal blank and an illusion, the child of sceptical scholarship (313). Such a
sterilized figure, purged of any entanglement in history, does not allow us
to explain the “single blessedness” passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the nuns and friars in Measure for Measure, or the Purgatorial background
in Hamlet, not to mention other allusions in the plays to auricular confes-
sion, penitential satisfaction, merit, the Virgin Mary, intercessory prayer,
prayers for the dead, and pilgrimage – all the theological doctrines and prac-
tices that were anathema to the Reformed Churches in general and the
Church of England in particular. It is impossible, moreover, to reconcile the
Reformed theology of the Homilies and the Thirty-Nine Articles with
Shakespeare’s plays, and most especially with Measure for Measure.
However, it is much easier, as I have argued, to reconcile him with Roman
Catholic theology. Imposing evidence of this is apparent in the favorable
representation of Franciscan monastic life in Measure for Measure.
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NOTES
1 All quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are from The Complete Works of
Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, updated 4th ed. (New York: Longman,
1997).
2 Thus, David Bevington points out that “Shakespeare’s King John avoids all
suggestion of moral laxity in the monasteries” (197). The treatment of car-
dinals and bishops is another matter, but they are criticized for their “moral
crimes and political meddling, not for doctrine” (201). Bevington sees this
as evidence of “mild anticlericalism,” although by this reasoning
Shakespeare’s criticism of kings would make him antimonarchical as well. In
any case, “mild anticlericalism” stemming from political meddling by the
church hierarchy fits the profile of a moderate “church papist,” as Peter
Milward suggests in the most comprehensive and judicious treatment of the
subject (Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 68-84).
3 For a summary of recent scholarship on the subject, see Beauregard, “New
Light,” 159-60. See especially Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition:
Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 283-
314, esp. 290-98; and Richard Wilson, “Shakespeare and the Jesuits: New
connections supporting the theory of the lost Catholic years in Lancashire,”
Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 19, 1997): 11-13.
4 Likewise secular readings which claim that the play mocks virginity and is
hostile to all religion are unconvincing in their excessive ingenuity and in
their conspicuous inability to offer evidence from a significant Elizabethan
intellectual, ethical, or dramatic tradition. In the tradition of enlightenment
rationalism, their basic assumption is that Shakespearean drama, like Greek
tragedy, must be subversively at odds with religion, misconceived as myth
and superstition. Convinced that minds of a high order cannot subscribe to
a religious conception of the human condition, proponents of this notion
discount obvious evidence to the contrary, e.g., the glaring examples of
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Milton’s Paradise Lost. They bracket off the gen-
eral religious orientation of Elizabethan and Stuart culture, not to mention
its Christian “worldview,” as if it did not exist. Taken to its logical conclu-
sion, the secular claim leaves us with the mandarinic postulate that
Elizabethan audiences were largely uncomprehending, duped by an “enlight-
ened” sceptic who had no integrity whatever in throwing them sops like the
Ghost in Hamlet and the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. This enlightenment
rationalist discomfort with Shakespeare’s world-view and the concomitant
inability to come to terms with it thus forces the projection of a secular
agenda onto Shakespeare, cloaked in an engaging style, spiced with cynical
assertions and sustained by intimidating appeals to fashionable authorities,
a rather amusing irony for “autonomous” minds. Finally, as David Cressy
has observed of Foucault’s unhistorical assertions, “it comes down to evi-
dence versus agenda” (130).
5 By refusing to exchange her chastity for her brother’s life, Isabella has been
accused of sin and a “lack of charity” (Gless 127-32, Velie 47, Hunter 217-
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David Beauregard
18). This simplistic and absurd charge ignores the consequences of such a
forced capitulation – the abuse, degradation, and violation that Isabella
would undergo. Realistically, as the subsequent action explicitly indicates,
such a “sacrifice” would in fact not save Claudio’s life. Angelo orders
Claudio killed anyway.
6 5.1.132, 140-41, 291, 312, 334-35, 347, 360, 361.
7 This mentality seems to be in recession and in the process of being replaced
by a conception of the individual in relationship with nature and commu-
nity. See J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, Alasdair MacIntyre,
Dependent Rational Animals and Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art.
8 For recent studies in the English Reformation, see Margo Todd, ed.
Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England
(London: Routledge, 1995). For recent bibliography on Renaissance philos-
ophy, see the Charles B. Schmitt, et al., eds. The Cambridge History of
Renaissance Philosophy. For virtue ethics, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory and Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Philosophy:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature.
9 See footnote no. 3.
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